Out of the Black Land

Chapter Twenty-one

Mutnodjme

Tani and Hani escorted me into the inner chamber of my lord Ptah-hotep’s office. They were both carrying spears and were grave—no jokes about lust this night. The Widow-Queen Tiye and I had groomed ourselves very carefully for this meeting. She was wearing her greying hair loose, threaded through with garlands and ribbons, and the finest gauze draped her limbs. I had borrowed Merope’s block-patterned cloth with indigo riders all over it and had tucked my own hair under a heavy court-wig, decorated with a lotus crown.

We wanted to look like we were going to a feast with no other thoughts but good wine and good company. The Widow-Queen had sung a little song as we paced the corridors. When I could hear what she was singing, it was not a feasting or a love song but a curse, sung to a light melody.

The Widow Queen Tiye says

The crocodile be against him in water

The snake be against him on land

He shall have no offering

No bread and no beer

No wine and no oil

The earth shall not be dug for him

The offerings shall not be made for him

When he dies, when he dies.

She was frightening me, this red-headed woman, and I began to wonder whether there might have been something in the old superstition that red hair is a sign of the children of Set the Destroyer.

The occupants of the room rose as we came in. There was my dear Ptah-hotep, and with him a young man equally slim and well made, with black eyes and dark, weathered skin. He smiled and bowed, as did the huge man hauling himself out of the chair of state.

General Horemheb still stood a cubit above me. His chest was massive, his hands were huge as he took mine very carefully, bowed, and then knelt to the Widow-Queen as was proper. She put her right palm on his head and told him to rise and we all sat down.

‘Meryt has made a feast and we will have to eat it,’ said Ptah-hotep with a trace of apology. ‘Otherwise my domestic life will not be worth living.’

‘That does not seem to be a heavy task,’ said General Horemheb, smiling, and when Meryt and Teti came in escorting a train of children, all bearing dishes, he greeted the Nubians in very good Nubian.

‘Hail, lady of the Village-between-two-trees!’ he said, and Meryt was so surprised that she almost dropped her big platter of cooked meat. She replied in her own tongue, ‘Hail, Great Warrior! You do my family honour by eating with us. When were you in the Village-between-two-trees, lord?’

‘But last year. The children who were babes when the Egyptians came are grown now and your uncle is Chief. He sends you greetings, sister.’

It was a measure of the worth of the General Horemheb that he had remembered the slave Meryt, whom he had seen perhaps twice, and had enquired into the state of her home village. The Nubians all bowed to him.

Then I collected a piece of egg panbread and a slice of fennel cake and Meryt’s speciality, flat fried goat, from a very self-important toddler. The food was exclusively Nubian and very tasty.

‘How are you getting along in your study of cuneiform, lady Mutnodjme?’ asked Kheperren. This was my lord’s heart’s love and I examined him closely, hoping that he was worthy of such regard.

‘It is very difficult. I shall try learning a few new signs every day, practicing the previously-learned ones, and I may master it before I die of old age. I stand in awe of anyone who can decipher three languages from the same script. Babylonian is not too difficult to learn if you have someone to talk to, and there were three Babylonian ladies in the temple where I learned such things,’ I replied, censoring the name of Isis may she forgive me. ‘How is your Nubian? Your general is very fluent.’

‘Not too bad, but I have had to learn it, lady, we have a large number of Nubian troops. It is not a particularly difficult dialect. But I can’t speak Babylonian at all.’

He was far too thin for a scribe, who usually tended to fat due to the sedentary nature of their profession. He had a scar on his forehead, running up into his hair which was white over the track, giving him an appearance of being painted, like the Nubians warriors who had been known to dye their heads and beards red or blue. He looked like a child of the common people, his colouring much like my own. But I knew, because Tiye the Queen had told me, that his father was a nobleman and his connections were very high indeed. His hands were restless. He had them clasped so that they would not move or tap. I recognised my own method of restraining tension. The knuckles were pale under the tanned brown skin. He wore a scribe’s long cloth, entirely plain, and a pectoral and earrings of stylised lotus blossoms, exceptionally beautiful and very valuable.

His general was wearing the same armour and cloth as any common soldier. I wondered that he had no medals of honour, because I had actually been there when Amenhotep-Osiris had given him a commendation for bravery, a golden fly, and the King had commented that he had a whole flock of flies already settled on his mail-shirt. That deed, I recalled, had been the rescue of a band of troops cut off and besieged under a mountain with no chance. Horemheb had sent his soldiers climbing down the cliff, going first himself, and had got all his soldiers out when the enemy’s attention had been diverted by a line of bonfires on the opposite ridge.

Horemheb was relaxing. I knew that he was seldom in company and perhaps he was not used to the presence of ladies. He did not go to feasts, saying that he was merely a rough soldier and did not know how to behave at such things. There was a saying in the palace at Thebes, used when someone talked about an unlikely happening; That will be when General Horemheb attends a feast!—meaning, never. But here he was at a feast, a small feast but a feast nonetheless, with garlands and wine and music.

The music was provided by Teti on double-pipe, his wife Hala on a drum and one of the other wives singing, all accompanied by any spare Nubian children clapping in time. Nubian children seem to absorb musical skill with their mother’s milk. I had seen one of them sit down quietly with a little drum and play for hours, teaching himself how to produce a variety of sounds. Like Egyptian music, the Nubian ‘day-long-song’ consisted of one voice singing a verse and the rest singing the chorus. Most of the songs were about love. This one was no exception. I could not follow all of it and I asked Kheperren the scribe to translate.

‘They are singing, Oh, my love, my maiden, she who is as slender as the pine tree, as sweet as the melon, as faithful as the sun,’ he sang along gently in Egyptian.

‘Come to me, my maiden, when the moon rises, when the night is loud with frogs, and lie down under the tree of fragrance, take me in your arms, make the night fall in love with the day.

‘It is a courtship song. A Nubian can keep singing it for months, until finally the object of his affection is seduced.’

‘Or she cannot bear one more verse and complies,’ I suggested.

He laughed and said, ‘On the condition that he does not sing anymore.’

We were friends. This pleased me and would certainly please Ptah-hotep who had been worried about having two lovers. I did not see any difficulty and it did not seem that Kheperren did, either. This was a relief. The song continued—I could see how, after a decan or so, it would begin to irritate the nerves—and the general who never went to feasts made polite conversation with the Widow-Queen Tiye and even made her laugh.

He still had the blue beads which I remembered from my encounter with the Nile. He was still huge and I imagined that he was still as strong as he had been when he had been a youth with smooth shoulders. He felt me looking at him and turned very quickly, as if expecting an enemy at his back, and laughed when he saw that it was only me.

‘Lady, I hope I did not startle you,’ he said. ‘I felt your eyes, and most eyes which have been fixed on my back have had an arrow trained along their gaze.’

‘It is nothing, lord general, and I do not startle easily,’ I replied. He examined me.

‘No, you don’t, do you? Tell me, lady Mutnodjme, where have you been since I last saw you?’ I liked his voice, it was deep and a little harsh.

‘In the temple, General, learning all I could learn, and then here, since Amenhotep-Osiris went to the Field of Reeds.’

‘And what do you do here? Apart from feast and make love?’

‘I learn, lord, one can learn anywhere. Good speech is rare, but it can be found in the speech of common women at the mill-stone, as was said in…’

‘The Maxims of Ptah-hotep!’ exclaimed General Horemheb. ‘My scribe has been quoting him to me for years. A very wise man.’

‘So is the present Ptah-hotep,’ I told him.

‘So I hear. You know, lady, I have been avoiding feasts for years. Do you know why?’

‘No, lord. Perhaps you were shy?’ I grinned at the huge, confident man.

‘Because I have never been to a feast where I have not had to listen to hours of elaborate compliment about being a soldier, together which a lot of ill-informed curiosity about what it feels like to kill someone. Not that they really wanted to know, you understand, not enough to actually listen. I tired very quickly of bringing stay-at-home sluggards the thrill of action, so I just refused all invitations. This is the first time I can recall that I have actually enjoyed myself at a feast.’

‘Perhaps because we know some of it, and would not think of asking the rest,’ I said.

‘Lady, I find it difficult to ascertain exactly what you know, but you are no palace ornament of the king, are you?’

‘No, lord, I am merely, as you know, the base-born half-sister of Nefertiti the Great Royal Wife; and my father, I regret to say, is Divine Father Ay and my mother is Royal Nurse Tey; and I must ask you not to hold my parentage against me. And I would never qualify as Ornament of the King,’ I said, making a play on the title of the Royal Women. General Horemheb was shaking his head.

‘Certainly not. You are very beautiful,’ he said consideringly, ‘but you are far too intelligent to be a concubine. What is this I hear, by the way, about your father making the Royal Women marry? I never heard of such a thing!’

‘Neither did I,’ I agreed, signalling to him to keep his voice down. ‘Not only is it shockingly unfair—some of the Royal Women have been here since they were small children, and they are old now—but what will the King tell the allies when they ask what has become of our sisters whom we sent you for espousal?

A lot of treaties were sealed with a marriage with Amenhotep-Osiris. The treaty with Kriti in the Great Green Sea was sealed with the gift of my dearest sister Merope, a princess of her island. If she is given away to a priest, what will King Minos of Kriti say about the insult?’

‘And what will Merope say?’ asked the Widow-Queen, who had caught some of this. ‘He even had the audacity to tell me that I must marry again—I, his mother!’

Ptah-hotep, who had clearly not heard of this, looked startled. ‘But, lady, are you sure that’s…’ he began, caught the Widow-Queen’s eyes, and said hastily. ‘I am sure that you are, of course, naturally, one would not make a mistake about such an outrageous proposal. But whoever thought of this must not have considered the foreign implications. One cannot give away the wives of a previous King as though they were a handful of festival ribbons!’

‘Why can’t he, if he does not care for the opinion of any but the Aten?’ demanded Kheperren.

‘Who are the priests of the Aten?’ asked General Horemheb.

‘Some of them are priests of Amen-Re who have seen the error of their previous ways,’ said Ptah-hotep. ‘Some are traders out of the market or commoners from the fields who do not even wash before they don their fine crowns and vestments. And some are boys, taken like I was taken, out of the schools. There is a school for scribes in the new temple of the Aten in Amarna now, and the children of the nobility go there. Some are aiming to repair their family’s fortunes and all of them are aiming to amass as much treasure as possible as fast as they can.’

‘Ah,’ Horemheb put his chin in his hand.

‘Shut up here in this city which the King says he will never leave,’ I said, ‘we know nothing of what is happening in the rest of the Black Land.’

‘I will tell you all if you wish and have the heart to hear it, but it can be summed up in one word: ruin,’ said Kheperren quietly.

Horemheb nodded. Ptah-hotep sighed and Widow-Queen Tiye sighed with him.

‘The festival of Opet did not take place this year, it was forbidden by the King Akhnaten, and the priests have been expelled from the temples of Amen-Re all over the country. The Nile did not flood and the people are saying that the country has been cursed for abandoning its old gods. The harvest last year was small and this year it will be less,’ Kheperren said.

‘The King takes more and more taxes for the building of his temples and this city, and the farmers will be on short rations this year. Without the central authority of the temple of Amen-Re, the local officials are cheating the people but not the King. The Watchers are being bribed and I even heard that Houses of Eternity are being robbed; the thieves’ excuse being that they were made without acknowledgment of the Aten and are thus heretical. Some of the officials of the Necropolis are allowing this to happen provided that they get a percentage of the stolen treasure.

‘Men are being taken for building labour even in the sowing season—even though this year all water for inner cultivation has to be lifted by hand from the river—so less land is being farmed and there will be less wheat.

‘And since the loss of the Temple of Isis, lady…’ Kheperren looked at me, ‘superstition rages, fevers sweep villages and sorcerers have made their appearance. A whole Nome worshipped the birth of a two-headed calf last year. A wandering magician convinced three villages to slaughter all their cattle and have a great feast, because the world would end the next day. The people did as he said because there was no one to persuade them otherwise. They committed murders and various abominations because it was the end of the world, and then when they woke up the next morning the world was still there but…’ he hesitated.

‘ But the magician had gone and so had all of their goods,’ I concluded. ‘There have always been people who see their chance for gain in a bad situation. And as Duammerset, Singer of Isis, used to say, There is never a disaster but humans will make it worse.’

Ptah-hotep

‘There’s worse,’ said my dear Kheperren. ‘Wise women are shunned now, and most children under five die because the mothers have no one to help and advise them. Many women die in childbirth because midwives are banned as witches.

‘In one village in the Delta they burned an old woman in a fire, saying she was a sorceress and had put a curse on their cattle, and in Elephantine they are throwing offenders to the crocodiles.’

‘The system of government is breaking down,’ mused Widow-Queen Tiye, ‘that means that all people will revert to whatever they believed before the wise lords of old introduced gods into Egypt. I would expect that fetishes and house gods will be venerated again, and that, as you say, human sacrifice and the long-forbidden cannibal feast will happen once more in places where there has been peace and stability for centuries. That would explain the crocodiles,’ she said. ‘Sobek was a local god before ever he was placed in the pantheon.’

‘And the old woman,’ Lady Mutnodjme agreed. ‘Before Isis there was a female demon with her head turned backward who crept into houses and put the evil eye on children, gave cattle diseases and blighted crops.’

‘And now,’ I added to the general gloom, ‘our lord is not only going to offend all of our allies by giving away their princesses like honey-cakes to beggars, but he is refusing to send aid to Tushratta of the Mittani; and if the Mittani fall we shall have Assyrians on the threshold.’

‘There is something, at least, that can be done for Tushratta, evil old scoundrel that he is,’ said Lady Tiye. ‘General, you have your own honour guard, have you not?’

‘Lady, I have,’

‘And how many men are they?’

‘Lady, one thousand. Three hundred mounted archers, three hundred light infantry, three hundred heavy cavalry and one hundred cooks, runners, scribes and others who count as light auxiliaries. They can fight if they need to, eh, Kheperren?’

My sweet love grinned at the general and touched the lock of white hair which covered the scar.

‘Your men will not be sent on the Aten’s business, my dear General, because they will be needed to guard your person, which is valuable and cannot be hazarded,’ said Widow-Queen Tiye. ‘There is nothing to stop you making a visit for me to Tushratta’s court, is there, taking a present to the old ally of my husband?’

She drew off a very heavy and valuable arm ring, embossed with the discredited symbol of Sekmet, She Who Loves Silence, the blood-drinking lion-headed avenger. She tossed it to the general who caught it deftly and stared at it.

‘I am ordering you, General, to take this arm ring to my old friend Tushratta with this message:

The Mistress of Egypt Tiye sends greetings to Tushratta of Mittani, and bids him remember that a lioness is more dangerous than a lion.

‘Will you do this, General?’

‘Lady,’ the general left his chair and knelt down at the Queen’s feet. ‘I will deliver your message.’

‘To Tushratta in person, mind, wherever he may be. You should try his border with Khatti. And try to kill Suppiluliumas if you can, he’s very ambitious.’

The grin was now very broad but the general merely replied, ‘Lady, I am your slave.’

‘I know,’ said the older woman dryly. ‘I may ask you to carry further messages for me. In fact, the Great Royal Scribe here will draw up a document which will authorise you to be anywhere at all with your thousand men, on my personal business. While I am alive, no one will interfere with you. When I am dead you must manage as best you may.’

That was my cue, obviously, to rise and get papyrus and wax for a seal. Kheperren and I wrote a commission from the Widow-Queen Tiye in the broadest and vaguest of terms, added a translation into two other languages underneath and carried it to the lady Tiye with a little pot of warmed wax for her approval. She read it, demanded a translation of the other parts, sloshed wax over the bottom and rolled her personal seal along it. I had not realised that Sekmet Destroyer of Mankind was her deity, but that goddess had a very fitting devotee in the Widow-Queen. That seal said to everyone, down to the meanest peasant who could not read in any language, that this scroll had come from the Great Royal Spouse Mistress of the Two Lands Widow-Queen Tiye and it would be much better to obey the bearer.

Still on his knees, General Horemheb accepted his commission with both hands and kissed the Widow-Queen’s feet.

‘You may do another task for me, if you will lend me your scribe,’ said the Widow-Queen, and Kheperren shot me an alarmed look. He was scared to death of the lady Tiye.

‘You may have him for any task which does not compromise his honour or risk his life,’ replied the General, replacing his gigantic frame in the chair of state.

‘Take my daughter Mutnodjme and allow her to walk in Amarna with your escort,’ the old queen smiled at my lady. ‘I want her report on these Priests of Aten. I need to find a reliable one for my sister widow Merope. She is young and wishes to marry again,’ said the Queen.

‘Do not women walk alone in Amarna?’ I asked in surprise.

‘No, my dear scribe, they are constrained to stay at home, mind their children, be an ornament for their husband’s house. A woman alone is hissed at as a whore, and may be attacked. A woman walking with a soldier, on the other hand, is safe. Wear subdued clothes, daughter, and do not stare any man in the face.’

‘Why not?’ objected Mutnodjme. ‘How am I to judge if he is a good man or not if I cannot see his eyes?’

‘Listen to his voice and watch his hands,’ the Widow-Queen informed her. ‘Discuss with your sister Merope as to what sort of man would meet her desires. It would be wise to do this quickly. When are you bidden to be gone, General Horemheb?’

‘Two decans, lady, for I am required to wait until the first reports come back as to the progress of the work in destroying the cult of Amen-Re and advise Pannefer as to further action.’

‘Good.’

‘Lady,’ said Mutnodjme, ‘Why cannot Kheperren take my sister Merope out to find her own husband?’

‘Because she cannot see him until the marriage is contracted; so said the King through his Queen Nefertiti.’

‘Why in the name of all the gods…’ she began, and the Widow-Queen laid a finger on her lips.

‘Because the King is afraid of everything; most of all he is afraid of the power of women. He gave the cult of the Phoenix to his wife to make her important and give her a position; a sop to satisfy her craving for adoration. She has not noticed that she has lost all her rights—the right to sit in council, the right to her own palace and her own guards, to her own general and army, to her own property, and even the rights over her own body, though that is not an issue. All women in the Black Land have lost these things, because the Queen has lost them. And he is marrying his eldest daughter, which is proper, but he is giving the mating of her to a priest of the Aten.’

‘But she’s only eleven, still a child. Which priest of the Aten?’

‘The head priest of course, Mutnodjme. Nothing is too good for the head priest of the Aten. Not even a child princess of Egypt.’

‘Divine Father Ay!’ choked Mutnodjme, and I knelt down beside her, ready to support her head if she vomited. She mastered her disgust in a moment, but her hand remained on my shoulder.

‘We can do nothing for the Princess Mekhetaten,’ said the Great Royal Wife. ‘But we can at least get one innocent out of this palace. Tomorrow, Mutnodjme, you will go looking for a husband for Merope.’

‘As you will, Lady,’ she said softly.

She sounded like the very pattern of humility, but I could feel her fury in my embrace, as though we were communicating skin to skin. I hoped that she was not angry with me. I hoped that she would not take her anger out on the innocent Kheperren. He knew very little of women, living almost his whole life as a man among men.

I remembered that the priestesses of Isis walked where they willed as did all women, and began to realise how terrible a prohibition this order might be to her. I was not only picking up anger from the lady. I was sensing despair.

I could not comfort her with words, though I could feel her side warming against mine and my touch might have soothed her. I had nothing, however, to say.

Kheperren had. He lifted his cup and said ‘Few scribes receive such delightful orders! The last one I was given sent me into an ambush by the vile Kush, lady.’

‘This one may be less perilous,’ said my lady Mutnodjme, and smiled at him.